Eth2 dev here, maintainer of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, one of the implementations currently running the blockchain written in Go. This has been a monumental effort. There are 3 other implementations in mainnet, and consensus is running perfectly. Few other protocols in blockchain have more than one dominant implementation. The beauty of eth2 comes from its efficiency in signature aggregation: https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910. This tweet thread summarizes the importance of the technology used.
Hey, I tried figuring out what the most recent official Ethereum wallet is, but the wallets which the website lists all seem like third-party ones.
The previous official wallet's repository says "Mist and Ethereum Wallet have been deprecated.".
Is it true that the Ethereum foundation isn't providing a wallet software anymore?
Why is that?
I would consider it as quite unsolvable as a user to determine which of the 24 third-party wallets is the most trustworthy, hence I'd prefer to just use one developed by the same people as Ethereum.
Honestly, I'm in the same boat. I have the full Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin core clients installed and with a full blockchain on my PC. With Ethereum, I always found the base client much buggier than the others (browser-based apps do that). And now, it's just 'pick one of these 24 random wallets'. Really?
I went from mining Ethereum and even releasing a minimal mining GUI for folks who wanted to support PortableApps.com to feeling uneasy about it. I don't even have an ETH client on my PC now, so I can't even access the fraction of an ETH I own. I'll probably ditch ETH donations to PortableApps.com as well.
Nope one was started as a joke and the other one, the founder sold literally his entire holdings at the top of the market for $600/LTC, 8x current price (and ran away to an island somewhere, I assume) years ago, leaving the foundation on the brink of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy claim which to be fair they denied in 2019. Smart man!
Honestly I'm surprised the coin is still around after that. What exactly does LTC bring to the table to support it's position as a top 5 cryptocurrency?
Not sure where you get your facts, but Litecoin all-time-high was around $360. The founder, Charlie Lee, stayed and is still a visible and active advocate for litecoin to this day.
My bad, I was wrong about the peak price (this was just from memory, and that was almost 4 years ago -- however no excuse for not looking it up).
I was, however, right about everything else. Lee sold all his coins, made a giant pile of money, the value of the coin collapsed to literally fractions -- and has yet to come anywhere close to a recovery.
If Elon sold 100% of his Tesla shares and "stayed a visible and active advocate for electric cars" I'm not sure you'd be as bullish.
No, he didn't run away (he's still very active in the community: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite) and the foundation wasn't on the brink of bankruptcy.
About the only thing you were right about is that he sold his coins. (According to him the reason was so he could be financially secure and able to focus on the project instead of feeling incentivized to pump the price)
With the advent of hardware wallets, and so many competing wallets/interfaces out there (tailored to different user bases), I feel it makes little sense for the Ethereum Foundation to pour their own (human) resources into this. They will support the ecosystems as necessary though, e.g. Metamask got funding way back in 2016.
> I feel it makes little sense for the Ethereum Foundation to pour their own (human) resources into this.
Well, they received $ 18.3 million in crowdfunding [1], so I would dare to say it's not only "their" resources but also the resources of the community which they're spending, isn't it?
Given that the central thing a user needs to use a cryptocurrency is the wallet it would seem a bit weird to collect $ 18M from their users to develop a cryptocurrency and then not develop the software which the users need to use the currency?
I mean they're a non-profit organization, if they don't hand anything out for the $ 18.3 M then they have profited quite a bit by taking in money but not delivering effectively usable goods from it?
It’s odd to accuse the Ethereum Foundation of not delivering and it would be hard to back that claim.
Developing yet another Ethereum wallet when there are so many on the market would be a waste. It’s better for the foundation to provide a list of high quality wallets that already exist.
> It’s odd to accuse the Ethereum Foundation of not delivering and it would be hard to back that claim.
It's actually quite easy: I opened the websites of all the 24 wallets they list and checked the imprint of each. None says it was developed by the foundation.
> Developing yet another Ethereum wallet when there are so many on the market would be a waste.
> It’s better for the foundation to provide a list of high quality wallets that already exist.
What would you think of me if I raised $18M to build a non-profit children's hospital and then used it to instead build a website which lists children's hospitals which were built by other people, most of which being for-profit companies, some even proclaiming themselves as registered in shady tax-haven countries, and most not even clearly showing where their company is registered?
The Ethereum Foundation's purpose is to fund and coordinate the building of the protocol and infrastructure surrounding it. That does include funding of wallet developers which it has done in the past but it's better for the ecosystem and decentralization if there are lots of high quality wallets instead of one default wallet everyone uses.
A better analogy would be, it's a fully-functioning hospital but they don't provide their own shuttle service, you have to arrange transportation to the hospital yourself.
They delivered ETH1 on July 30 2015, with several clients including Geth which is still popular today. That covered their promise to presale investors. They also made the Mist wallet/GUI, which was ultimately abandoned because competitors were better.
Now they've delivered the first part of ETH2 today.
I guess I shouldn't have put the "human" in parentheses. I did give an example of how the EF is spending their money on development of the ecosystem though, hoping that'd make it clear what I meant. I even chose a grant to a wallet as the example.
I personally prefer the role of the EF as a facilitator more than monolithic employer. And they can (and do) do facilitate in more ways than just handing out grants. It's just they experience has shown that helping out this way for wallet development (or even more generically software development) works better.
To add, they did start out providing the software as you say. After a certain point though, their efforts were outpaced by community effort or business opportunities arising in the Ethereum ecosystem. At this point it took a while for them to figure out what new role to take on with their ("our") funds, eventually settling on what they're doing now.
> It's just they experience has shown that helping out this way for wallet development (or even more generically software development) works better.
Does it really work better from the perspective of a user though?
Because as a user I am now sitting in front of 24 websites which look equally "meh" in terms of trustworthiness (fancy design and huge claims), each of them trying to get me to hand out money to their software (that's what a wallet is about!), and almost all of them seemingly being for-profit companies which avoid listing their address.
A single 1 well-known website (EDIT: I meant wallet, not website) of a non-profit would "work better" for me as a user in terms of trusting my choice to keep my money safe. (If I had any, not buying ETH in this situation :)
> To add, they did start out providing the software as you say. After a certain point though, their efforts were outpaced by community effort or business opportunities arising in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Do you notice that you're actually arguing in favor of my point? :)
You say that their efforts were "outpaced", i.e. they failed. That's not a good thing to yield for $ 18 M :(
(I have no clue how to reply when the depth is reached)
> Because as a user I am now sitting in front of 24 websites which look equally "meh" in terms of trustworthiness (fancy design and huge claims), each of them trying to get me to hand out money to their software (that's what a wallet is about!), and almost all of them seemingly being for-profit companies which avoid listing their address.
Yes, I guess that's definitely a disadvantage of the ecosystem growing so much. It's great that that happened, but it also means that the EF does not control everything anymore. They cannot advertise just one solution with so many out there, lest they rub someone the wrong way. But they also can't say nothing either. And then it just becomes very confusing with this information overload for beginners (though I think "list of 24 websites" is a bit of an exaggeration; it's not _that_ bad imo [0])
I don't think this is entirely new in the world of software though. Generally you then get to things like looking for advice on forums or word-of-mouth, and then there's a guy like me saying "if you're a beginner only wanting to make transactions on Ethereum, get a Ledger Nano X hardware wallet and use their Ledger Live application". And "if you then want to move on interacting with dApps, use Metamask and connect it to your Nano X".
> A single 1 well-known website of a non-profit would "work better" for me as a user in terms of trusting my choice to keep my money safe. (If I had any, not buying ETH in this situation :)
Well, you would definitely know cryptocurrency is a bit different than a website securing your funds. Someone needs to hold onto the private keys. If you're looking for something similar to a bank, then get something similar to a bank (Coinbase?). But this difference (custodial services, private keys, hardware wallet) definitely adds to the barrier one needs to overcome to get started. I would also argue that "1 well-known website" (or 1 major client implementation that then becomes the defacto standard) does not quite fit into the whole "decentralization" aspect of cryptocurrencies, but not everyone cares as much about that.
> Do you notice that you're actually arguing in favor of my point? :)
You could look at it that way I guess ;) Progress is a function of money, and the EF has more to attend to than just software/wallet development. They could certainly blow through all their ("our") money in a year building a super fancy wallet. Or, as has happened, spend a little to jump start the ecosystem, and then comes along not one but multiple better wallets _for free_! None of "your" money was spent on developing these. Seems like a good deal to me, as now "your" money can be spent jump starting other awesome things that no one is paying much attention to yet.
What you really want is a hardware wallet(trezor) that hooks into metamask. That way you have the usability of the plugin without the risk that it can take all your money
The people who sell them - and many people in their supply-chain! - are handed the very dangerous combination of:
A) Being able to hard-code software into the silicon whose source code you will be completely unable to inspect unless you own an electron microscope and a very large amount of knowledge on hardware reverse engineering. What if the hardware forces the PRNG to be predictable so they can remotely know my crypto's private keys without any internet connectivity whatsoever?
B) Knowing 100% for sure that the device they sell will be used to store money. They don't need to first find victims, they know ALL of their customers can be. It's like writing "MONEY INSIDE" on your house IMHO. Better use a general purpose PC whose vendor doesn't know what it'll be used for.
Trezor is open source, and you could generate your recovery seed on a computer and import it onto your hardware wallet. I believe Ethereum and some other cryptocurrencies prefer to use deterministic signatures on transactions, so in theory it's possible to check that all of the signatures generated by the hardware wallet match the expected deterministic signatures so you can know that the wallet isn't secretly leaking information through the signatures it's generating.
I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.
It would be disingenuous to claim that the Bitcoin protocol is only defined by the consensus layer.
Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661
When Btcd was first released, it was pretty capable, and had lots of development. But it has fallen behind, which makes sense. Why would anybody take the risk of trusting that an alternate implementation when it doesn't decide what bitcoin is, in the end? You may have to patch bitcoind a bit to get your desired interface, but that is much less work than maintaining a full P2P and consensus layer.
> Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations
Does that? What I see here is bitcoind adding a new feature that isn't yet implemented in btcd. The new feature uses a different extension mechanism in the p2p protocol (a new message to signal knowledge of a new feature vs using the existing version message bits in the main p2p handshake). That new version of bitcoind also hasn't yet been released, but I'd imagine that btcd will land a fix sooner to permit unknown message types being sent from its PoV.
> Check this vulnerability, which was caused by LND relying on the btcd project's library
Incorrect. The btcsuite libraries we use weren't related to the bug at all. Instead, the bug was introduced by _new_ code which attempted to convert between the fixed 64-byte signature encoding used in the LN Protocol, and the variable sized encoding used in the base Bitcoin protocol. The resulting signatures _were_ valid ECDSA signatures, but didn't adhere to an additional constraint that the Bitcoin system places on this signatures from a mempool policy standpoint. The signatures themselves were still valid from the PoV of Bitcoin consensus, in that they would be included in blocks.
> Why would anybody take the risk of trusting that an alternate implementation when it doesn't decide what bitcoin is, in the end?
bitcoind doesn't decide what Bitcoin is either: a recent consensus issue introduced for a period of times in _newer_ versions caused it to potentially fork off the "actual" chain. In this instance, btcd was unaffected along with many other implementations and earlier versions of bitcoind.
This is still true (and is just as true of Ethereum, whether the devs on that project think of it as true or not). There is at least one instance in the past where the network has forked based on the (unspecified) behavior of bitcoind, and a couple more close calls where such forking behavior was properly reported and fixed before triggering.
If there is any way in which different implementations of consensus-critical code behave differently for the same inputs, it can be used to split the network. If you are running a node implementation other than the majority hash-rate reference client, you open yourself up to be potentially vulnerable during the fork. This remains just as true, if not more so with staking instead of proof-of-work.
You can do things to protect yourself like run ALL implementations and shut down if a fork is detected, although properly setting that up is nontrivial and in the end what value is gained? It very, very, VERY rarely makes sense to have multiple reference implementations of consensus code.
